The persistence through which the effect is used evokes a world in which
speed is a strangely variable thing, to the extent that its inhabitants may share
spaces with others, even themselves, but often accelerate into different tempor-
alities. The use of slow motion is often congruent with a desire to study body
movements in intimate detail, just like in Muybridge’s motion studies and in
Dziga Vertov’s notion of the genius camera eye (rearticulated by Benjamin as
an“optical unconscious”). InStreet Spirit, such an epistemological interest in
the human body in motion comes in the background of a poetic interest in ex-
istential aspects of the human predicament. Key to the poetically surreal world
articulated here is the mutability and dynamism of time, and how a hybrid tem-
porality may render us worlds apart from the people around us who would
seem to share time and space with us, but do not.
Various forms of hybrid temporality can be found in other videos, for exam-
ple, in the video for the Goo Goo Dolls’Here Is Gone(Francis Lawrence,).
In this video, several shots combine people from two groups, one moving in
high speed, often in a staccato, produced by time-lapse photography, and an-
other group of ghostly-looking characters moving in slow motion. One scene
draws more explicitly on the idea of being in different worlds, as a woman in
slow motion comes up to and carefully kisses another woman from behind who
is seated at a table, eating. The woman being kissed does not notice. She occu-
pies a high-speed temporality, portrayed by means of time-lapse photography.
The divergent temporalities render them worlds apart, in spite of the intimacy
of the situation. It evokes a sense of loss, much like the temporal divide in melo-
dramatic stories where feelings of love and care are sadly expressed“too late.”
Carol Vernallis, after having discussed the video with the director, suggests that
it is of a ghost who“kisses a flesh and blood relative...transgressing the bound-
ary between worlds,”but this is hardly the only possible reading.Whatever
specificity is assigned to the group (ghosts, outcasts or other), the sentimentality
produced through the hybrid temporality inHere Is Goneis quite different
from the poetic surreal world ofStreet Spirit.
As is often the case in music videos, the rhythm of editing and of accelera-
tions and decelerations inStreet Spiritdo not coincide precisely with, and
therefore do not interfere with, the beat of the song. Rather, the editing coheres
with the song’s mood the way it evolves, and with the deeper emotional logic of
the song. A radically different approach to the way the visuals of a video inter-
venes rhythmically is demonstrated in Cunningham’s music video,Only You
(), for the Portishead song of the same name.
Mutable Temporality In and Beyond the Music Video 165